You can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction

Category Archives: Wreck this journal

Honestly after reading about the most recent facts, I can’t avoid remarking what I said yesterday: all monsters are human; our society is dominated by hate and that’s scaring and painful.

Bad day for my aching body too, so I tried to distract myself from it by doing a bit of my Wreck This Journal and by trying to face again Finnegans Wake by Joyce.

First part was easy, I’m not good at drawing, but it relaxes me a lot. Here’s my bad portrait of Twisty the clown from AHS Freakshow.

Second part was challenging, but I think I found the right way to go through Joyce’s work. He wrote Finnegans Wake in 17 years and it is said that he expected the reader to spend the same amount of time on it. Moreover he said that it would have kept critics busy for at least 150 years. I must admit that things are easier and less frustrating since I stopped the analytic approach and I read it following the musical flow of words. In the end Joyce was a writer, but he also loved music a lot, he was a good tenor.

And if you don’t try to understand its literary puns, the book is much more pleasant. I have a theory about it: what if Joyce wanted to jerk critics and readers around with a nonsense work just because he knew they will have received it as a masterpiece and will have spent hours and words trying to decript it? I’m sure his aim was this and moreover I’m sure he hid in the novel a meaning nobody will ever find.

So if you want to read Finnegans Wake, enjoy(ce). You can listen some good Celtic punk while reading as well.

I’d like to continue last post’s issue because it’s important to me. As I said, I consider arts as therapies, I feel better when I write or do something creative and I switch the world off whenever I listen to a song or I start a new book.

I’m currently unemployed due to my health conditions and it’s difficult to get some translations jobs to do from home, but I still think it’s important to invest the very little money I have in art. Here you can see my Wreck this journal when I haven’t started it already, whose motto is “to create is to destroy”. It’s a journal with some tasks you have to follow, tasks that really involve weirdest way to create, as “Rub here with dirt” or “Sew this page” because the aim of this journal is not having a beautiful perfect piece of art, but bringing out people’s creativity, overcome their limits or the fear of not doing well. That’s why, in my opinion, Keri Smith ironically dedicated it to perfectionists all over the world. I love this idea that the creative process is more important than the end product, so I shared it immediately. It will be very helpful to distract me from pain or depression (in the end social medias are frustrating, with all those people having fun or having a normal life) and it would be a good company during my hospital shit or in the doctors’ waiting room. I will share my progress (oh, how interesting, right?) posting finished pages here.

The song I chose for this post is inspired to one of Frida Khalo’s pieces of art. Chris Martin said in an interview that he christened this song and the album “Viva la Vida” after he saw the phrase on a painting by the Mexican artist. He explained: “She went through a lot of shit, of course, and then she started a big painting in her house that said ‘Viva la Vida.’ I just loved the boldness of it.”

So again, I’m back to JD’s question: why art? Because creating lifts souls, because any kind of art makes the world a better place to live in.